The trope of sibling rivalry has been around since antiquity. From the Greek mythology of Homer’s The Iliad where Aries and Athena battle it out on different sides of the Trojan war to Shakespeare’s King Lear and the brothers Edmund deviously plotting against their father’s “legitimate son” Edgar…even as far back as the Old Testament rivalry of Cain and his brother Abel…you remember, the first murder in our history…brothers and sisters have been going at it.

Edmund and Edgar wrestling in King Lear

Ares and Athena...the Gods of war

Cain killing his brother Abel in Genesis.

The Bennet Sisters from Pride and Prejudice

We’re comfortable with this trope because we have all been frustrated with a brother or sister or have known someone who complains about his/her siblings. It’s common and very near to our realms of experience. Whether it’s the Bennet Sisters fighting over husbands in Pride and Prejudice or Fredo and Michael Corleone from The Godfather fighting over the family business, things can get messy. Many times it’s the boys who are rivals for the attention of the father, as in The Lord of the Rings with Boromir and Faramir or even on television we’ve seen Bobby and J.R. Ewing in Dallas. We even see it as young children in the film The Lion King between Mufasa and Scar.

In The Man who Cheated Himself we have two brothers, Ed and Andy Cullen, who are cops. The older one is the seasoned veteran while his younger brother is the rookie. The acting in this film is good and the story is believable but there are some moments that give viewer pause. In our modern day of forensic science, it’s difficult to watch these older crime stories where people leave fingerprints everywhere and fibers and all kinds of mistakes, but we have to remember all that technology didn’t really exist back in the 50s. What did exist was sibling rivalry. This is a story about the younger brother doing his job as a policeman and having to catch his older brother who has committed the crime. The only problem…the older brother is the one training him to be a cop on the same case.

There’s a nice twist here. The younger brother gets no pleasure in chasing after his older brother. You can see that it pains him. That moves this film from a cliché to an interesting study on sibling rivalry.